Sam Altman’s Crypto Project Worldcoin Got More Coins in Latest $115M Raise

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Welcome back to Chain reaction.

You have change ? No? Well, Worldcoin did.

tools for humanitythe Worldcoin building team, raised $115 million in a Series C round led by Blockchain Capital.

The crypto-focused project was co-founded by Open AI CEO Sam Altman with a three-part mission: to create a global ID, global currency, and app that enables payment, purchases, and transfers using his token, as well as other cryptocurrencies and assets traditional.

Worldcoin has faced some concerns from people concerned about privacy risks, as it requires scanning the eyeballs of a billion people with a five-pound chromatic sphere called “The Orb” in exchange for his token.

“For good reason, people are nervous and sensitive about biometrics — especially when you add a dose of crypto,” Spencer Bogart, general partner at Blockchain Capital, wrote in a post. job Wednesday.

“However, what is really happening under the hood is that the orb takes a picture of an iris and the device then generates a unique encoding of the randomness of the iris (an “iris code “),” Bogart added. “By default, the original biometrics are immediately destroyed and the iris code is the only thing that leaves the orb.”

Although the public may be hesitant, investors are still diving into the project as it is one of the few crypto companies to still receive large sums of capital in the midst of an ongoing bear market.

Other Series C investors include a16z, Bain Capital Crypto, and Distributed Global. In March 2022, Worldcoin raised $100 million at a valuation of $3 billion.

In 2021, Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania says TechCrunch that the currency is part of a larger effort to drive a more unified and equitable global economy driven by the internet economy, something that cryptocurrencies notably failed to nail in their early years.

The latest raise will go towards bot detection, research and development, and the expansion of its Worldcoin project and app. Worldcoin is currently in beta testing and has onboarded around two million users across five continents.

The story continues

Bogart and Blockchain Capital believe that Worldcoin could become the biggest crypto on-ramp and the World App could become the most widely adopted crypto wallet. All of this is to be determined.

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The last capsule

For last week episode, Jacqueline interviewed Sergei Nazarovco-founder of Chainlink, a protocol that provides an oracle network to power smart contracts.

Chainlink is also known as a web3 service platform that connects people, businesses and data with the web3 world. And for good reason – it has enabled over $7 trillion in transaction volume across DeFi, gaming, NFT, and other major industries.

Prior to co-founding Chainlink, Nazarov co-founded four other companies, most recently SmartContract, which focused on smart contracts.

We discussed a number of things regarding smart contracts, oracle networks, cross-chain interoperability, and Nazarov’s long-term vision for Chainlink.

We also dove into:

• Unexpected smart contract use cases

• Cryptographic guarantees

• How Traditional Businesses Can Tokenize Assets

• AI and blockchain technology

• PICC Updates

To subscribe to Chain reaction on apple podcast, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to follow the latest episodes, and leave us a comment if you like what you hear!

follow the money

1. Launch of Dispersion Capital $40 million fund focused on decentralized infrastructure

2. Decentralized scientific start-up LabDAO raises $3.6 million

3. openfort raises $3 million to create ‘frictionless’ crypto accounts for gamers

4. Institution-focused digital asset platform PYOR raises $4 million

5. Application Automation Platform Expressway raises $2.3 million

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reports.

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